Otis College of Art and Design is pleased to host the Los Angeles Portfolio Day on January 15, 2017 from 12-4pm!

Bring your portfolio for an informal review by representatives from art and design schools, and learn about their programs of study. Portfolio Day events are held across the country, high school students, parents, teachers, guidance counselors and college transfer students are encouraged to attend.

In acoustical engineering, “tuning the room” is a technique for measuring the specific sound properties of an enclosed space and then adapting the environment to improve its acoustic reflections. New York-based artist Anna Craycroft applies this technique both literally and metaphorically to the Ben Maltz Gallery for her exhibition Tuning the Room. Craycroft’s exhibition asks that we consider how the specific characteristics of an environment shape our experience within it, and how we become attuned in return.

Robin Coste Lewis won the National Book Award for Voyage of the Sable Venus. Her writing has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Callaloo, The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, Transition: Women in Literary Arts, VIDA, Phantom Limb, and Lambda Literary Review. She has taught at Wheaton, Hunter, Hampshire, and the NYU Low-Residency MFA in Paris. Lewis is a fellow of Cave Canem and of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities, as well as a Provost’s Fellow in Poetry and Visual Studies at USC.

Solmaz Sharif’s first collection, Look, was recently published by Graywolf Press and is a 2016 National Book Award finalist. Her poetry has appeared in the New Republic, Granta, Poetry, and other journals. Her first collection, Look, was recently published by Graywolf Press. A former Stegner Fellow, she is currently a lecturer at Stanford University and lives in the Bay Area.

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Mario Ybarra, Jr. (’99, Fine Arts) describes his art as simply an effort to "translate the experience growing up in my neighborhood, the stuff that was around my grandma's house, and around in my mom's house." He grew up in Wilmington, a city with a large Latino population, surrounded by the growth of hip-hop, graffiti and drug culture. His work and community activism have been fueled by the difficulties he has witnessed. He is a lecturer in Otis' Fine Arts Dept. His work has been included in exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, and the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art.

Rita Gonzalez, a consulting curator for the 2008 Whitney Biennial that featured his work, said of Ybarra that he is part of a new generation of Chicano artists who are shaped by the music, MTV and local subcultures. "It's not like being Chicano is not part of his consciousness,” notes Gonzalez, “it's just that he's telling the stories in different ways, not through painting the Virgin of Guadalupe."

Ybarra conducts workshops for kids around the country with other artists in the "Slanguage" artists' collective. He and his artist wife, Karla Diaz, also organize shows for New Chinatown Barbershop in L.A. Ybarra has also curated a survey of graffiti art at the Inshallah Gallery, L.A. and an exhibition of ball-pen drawings by inmates at Pelican Bay State Prison.